The purpose of this thesis was to create a unified Instagram marketing strategy for the case company ONIMOS Clothing. The company has some rules established but they have not been documented or justified in any form.
Throughout the theoretical part of this thesis, various components of an Instagram strategy have been researched, and within the benchmarking of competitors and the observation of the company’s account actions those components have been looked at rather closely. The target was to gather information about Instagram tools that the company uses already and tools that might be interesting for the company in order to create a structured strategy with the different tools.
Seven tools have been researched but only six of them are considered more closely in the empirical part. The author decided to only do further research on the six chosen tools as the seventh one, the giveaways, did not seem to be a key for creating brand awareness. The final Instagram strategy includes an explanation of how to use influencer marketing, content scheduling, content creation, Instagram ads, storytelling, and the interaction with Instagram users.
6.6.1 Influencer marketing
Onimos already has experience with influencer marketing in the German market.
Nevertheless, when Onimos moved to London, it also started to work on connections with several influencers. Onimos offers the influencers PR samples in exchange for several postings by the influencers about the brand Onimos. The
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problem that has been seen is that often the brand of Onimos does not profit very much from the influencers’ work as Onimos would hope.
When researching influencer marketing, it was defined more clearly which types of influencers exist, and which might be more useful for a rather small company.
Onimos should focus and spend time on searching for possible micro- and nano-influencers. After finding them, they should not only be included in one single cooperation, but a good relationship should be built with them. This will lead to further future cooperation, which makes this form of advertisement rather trustworthy. The followers of the influencer will see that the influencer is honestly involved with the company’s products and that the influencer is not only showing them for a payment.
While benchmarking the other companies’ Instagram profiles, it was quite hard to find information on if they are using influencer marketing or not. As mentioned in the theoretical framework, often it is not clear if people have been paid for content creation or if they are just customers who create good content and want to become influencers.
Nevertheless, it would be suggested for Onimos to continue the influencer marketing as it is a good chance to make the brand more visible. Especially as the company is quite new in London, it is important to become known by local people. When looking at the audience of Onimos in its Instagram Insights, still the largest percentage of followers are located in the German market and only a small portion of followers are located in the United Kingdom. This indicates that Onimos needs to spread in this market. Based on the theoretical framework, influencer marketing might be a good way to spread the brand image.
6.6.2 Content scheduling
For the content scheduling there are two different sections: scheduling the Instagram feed and scheduling the story postings. This part will not be published as information of Instagram Insights of the company is shown and the company wants to keep this information confidential.
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This chapter is not going to be published as various information from this chapter would give other potential competitors too much information about Onimos’
actions.
6.6.4 Using Instagram ads
Onimos has not been using Instagram ads until now. As Onimos is a small-sized company, the budget for Instagram marketing is not very large and until now Onimos was investing quite many resources in the influencer marketing.
With Instagram ads it is possible to spend little money, but in return reach a few thousand Instagram users. The budget can easily be controlled and estimated.
As the goal for this thesis is to increase the brand awareness, one of the main suggestions is to try Instagram ads with a smaller budget. The reason for this suggestion is that it is easier to reach Instagram accounts that are not following
@onimos.store through Instagram ads than to be found by other Instagram accounts by accident. Furthermore, it is recommended to start an Instagram ads campaign after the Instagram account of Onimos itself has applied the other components of the Instagram strategy for a while in order to present a unified image to the new potential followers.
Onimos can then select the target audience of the Instagram ad in order to reach more Instagram users that are located in the United Kingdom. A well thought through selection of the target group will lead to an effective use of the money that is invested Instagram ads.
When working with Instagram ads it is important to choose a suitable layout for the ad in order to create brand awareness. There are many ways to approach this tool in terms of the design of the ad. As Onimos wants to create brand awareness, it is important to work with the existing color scheme of Onimos and to point out what is typical for Onimos. Based on the company’s image, it would be suggested to create a carousel ad in which models can be seen wearing Onimos vintage clothes. The company should stick to the bold colorful scheme
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because this is what represents the company. The logo of Onimos should also be included in the pictures and perhaps at the end of the carousel, or between the pictures there could be one picture where the emphasis is placed on the logo.
This can be done by showing some Onimos merchandise such as stickers, jute bags or paper bags or by showing a picture of the shop front.
6.6.5 Storytelling
The storytelling was mostly analyzed by benchmarking the competitors’ actions. It could be seen that there are many different approaches.
Some companies have a settled scheme of what they are posting. For example, Truevintage Clothing is posting the same type of pictures every day. In addition, their theme is very clear and minimalistic, which is also visible in their Instagram feed. Also, Darkparadise Vintage is following several rules, but they are using a rather colorful layout. However other companies such as Atika or Rokit have a rather unstructured color scheme.
While analyzing the mood boards in Appendix 1, that have been created for all companies’ story content, it became clear that the companies that
follow certain color schemes and layout regarding the backgrounds or also the type and color of the text. “A mood board is a collage or composition of images, visuals and other objects, often created for the purposes of design or presentation. Mood boards can help designers to figure out how to create unified styles or themes for a design project. “(Techopedia n.d.) Also using the same models several times in an Instagram story makes the story more recognizable in terms of the brand because the Instagram user gets used to the faces and connects them with the brand. In the case of Onimos, a color scheme has been set to the colors pink, purple and black which the company uses clearly and continuously. This can be seen when looking at the story postings of Onimos. An example from 16April 2019 can be seen in Figure 7.
Figure 5: Screenshot of
@onimos.store Stories Archieve
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Another feature that Onimos is managing quite well in its Instagram stories is to make the follower part of the day at the company. Onimos makes its brand tangible and likeable.
Also, the use of GIFs was introduced to the company’s story throughout the thesis process. The company is adding GIFs that follow the color scheme of Onimos and that underline the brand image of the company.
The usage of the different features for the Instagram story, such as emoji sliders or question tags, might not directly be useful for creating brand awareness because they are not unique enough, but still the company could employ them in order to get closer to their followers. Those features keep the followers interacting with the profile and, as mentioned in previous chapters, this is an important part of building a strong brand.
One of the next goals of Onimos should be to arrive at 10,000 followers in order to be able to use the swipe up link function. The swipe up link makes a brand look more serious and it will be rather easy and convenient to visit, for example, the company’s website, which is also part of a brand’s appearance.
6.6.6 Interaction with Instagram users
As it was mentioned in the theoretical framework, the interaction with the Instagram users should be an essential part of the Instagram strategy. Interacting with other Instagram users means to comment, like, or share their posts, for example. Onimos should develop a routine to like and comment on profiles that already are following the company but also on accounts that might be interested in the company. Those accounts could be found through location tags or hashtags for example. This makes the company’s profile more visible and more people might pay attention to the company’s profile.
Interacting with Instagram users is also important in order to create and increase engagement. Interacting with comments and likes will make the Instagram user more valued and recognized. This influences again the appearance of the posts of Onimos regarding the operating mode of the algorithm of Instagram.
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7 Conclusion
In the conclusion part the author reviews the main findings of the thesis, describes the success of the research process and gives suggestions for further possible research on this topic.